Vista Gaming?

Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
hey, i was just thinking about getting the aluminum iMac soon after Leopard comes out andI was wondering, if you use Boot Camp to dual boot vista, how is the gaming? I know that it would have a 256mb video card but just curious as to how that goes. thanks

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    Unsure about that also .
  • Reply 2 of 10
    The older imacs had a better card for gameing.
  • Reply 3 of 10
    yamayama Posts: 427member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by CAHP19 View Post


    hey, i was just thinking about getting the aluminum iMac soon after Leopard comes out andI was wondering, if you use Boot Camp to dual boot vista, how is the gaming? I know that it would have a 256mb video card but just curious as to how that goes. thanks



    It works, but it isn't incredible. I've been able to run the Call Of Duty 4 demo on Vista at 1024x768 at a reasonable frame rate. This was sans anti-aliasing which really slows the crap out of the system.



    Later today I'm planning on installing Half-Life 2 + EP1 + EP2 + TF2 + Portal which should run better seeing as it's optimised for ATi cards.



    Call Of Duty 2 ran in full resolution at 1680x1050 silky smooth. But that's what you'd expect from an older game
  • Reply 4 of 10
    gongon Posts: 2,437member
    Just a suggestion, how about Windows XP instead of Vista? I doubt you would want to turn DX10 rendering on, considering the iMac's GPU speed, so you don't lose features. XP should remain both faster and more reliable for the time being.
  • Reply 5 of 10
    are there any ideas or experiences out there as to how Half Life 2 and all the other stuff in Orange Box go on an iMac?
  • Reply 6 of 10
    yamayama Posts: 427member
    Well, I ended up waiting longer than I expected to install The Orange Box But now that the price on the damn thing has finally come down I went out and bought it. Now I've got it happily installed on my 20" iMac.



    So far I've only been playing Portal and Half-Life 2, both of which run perfectly well at 1680x1050 with all the settings turned up to max. Apart from the anti-aliasing which still slows everything down. I expect TF2, Episode 1 & Episode 2 will run a bit slower, but so far so good.



    Also decided to buy the full version of Call Of Duty 4, which, like I mentioned above, runs okay in 1024x768 with anti-aliasing off. I'd guess it runs somewhere between 30-60 fps. It does tend to slow down heavily during some of the Russian missions at the end unfortunately.



    Strange thing though - Call Of Duty 2 ran much worse under Vista than it did under Tiger. I have no idea why, but it ran extremely slowly at 1680x1050 whilst booted into Vista. I had to nudge it down quite a lot before it ran as smoothly as the demo did on Mac OS X 10.4.



    Finally, there's the Unreal Tournament 3 demo which ran pretty much the same as Call Of Duty 4, again in 1024x768. I bumped up all the settings as far as they'd go and it was a blast. I might get the Mac version over the PC version just for fun.



    I was also going to download the Crysis demo, but I considered this to be slightly suicidal, so I didn't bother in the end.
  • Reply 7 of 10
    4metta4metta Posts: 365member
    I wouldn't bother. The hardware won't run the games well.



    If you want to game go PC or get an Xbox360 if you still want a mac.



    There's a Half Life2 fan site and last time I checked the webmaster tried unsuccessfully to get Half Life 2 running well on his mac. Here's the link if you want to ask: http://www.hlfallout.net/
  • Reply 8 of 10
    Half Life 2 scales really well on most hardware - the iMac should have no trouble, however for games like CoD 4, I seriously doubt it, I have an Nvidia 6800 in my desktop (vista business), and it plays the demo really smooth and fluidly with 2xAA, but only at 640x480.



    It's almost gotten to the point you need a 8800GT or a console like the 360; the 360 is cheaper, but you have a good chance of the RROD.
  • Reply 9 of 10
    Since I was worried about the RROD, I got my Elite Xbox360 at Best Buy and bought their 2 year warranty for cheap. Their warranty is the best in the biz: replace not repair. So basically if your Xbox acts up you grab a new one. For that reason I decided to grab that and ignore the Microsoft 3 year warranty. Plus, you don't have to wait for mail to deliver your replacement. Hopefully I won't have to bother. Mine gets used every day and I've had zero probs so far.
  • Reply 10 of 10
    gongon Posts: 2,437member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by guinness View Post


    It's almost gotten to the point you need a 8800GT or a console like the 360; the 360 is cheaper, but you have a good chance of the RROD.



    If you're fine running games at low resolutions (like the consoles always are - they just hide it from you) then you don't need a 8800GT just yet.



    It's a good buy though. So is the 3850.
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